Oresteia II
The Agamemnon Concluded:
I'll be very brief with the rest of the Agamemnon in order to discuss, more rapidly, the next two plays, where the moral and political crisis becomes apparent. The central scene of the play, in dramatic terms, is the confrontation of Clytaemestra and Agamemnon. She is the complete master of the situation, a man in woman’s body (as the chorus suggests), and she persuades her husband to repeat, symbolically, the arrogance and impiety he displayed in the sack of Troy and sacrifice of Iphigenia. He knows it is a sign of oriental despotism to walk upon the tapestries, but he does it anyway. Note the parallel: In v. 248 Iphigenia’s saffron-colored robes spill to the ground like blood; here Clytaemestra strews crimson oriental tapestries for Ag., persuading him that Priam--who we are told is the worst of sinners--would have done the same. He knows better--treat me as a man, not as a god he says (925).
Clytaemestra traps her flattered husband in a web of ambiguous words--referring (975 ff.) to her rightful lord, who for her is really Aegisthus, etc. She then traps him in an actual net and with her lover stabs him to death. She leaves, after a few threatening exchanges with Priam's daughter, the prophetess Cassandra, who, once she is alone, begins to “freak out”. This house, she says, is loathed by heaven, stained with the blood of children, and she is like a hound on the scent of blood. (But remember the Erinyes/ Furies are also hounds, lurking up on the roof and in the gables--like the watchman who played dog).
Like the chorus in the Parodos, Cassandra is outside time and space--this is in tragedy the lyric prerogative, which gives tragedy its liturgical dimension. She sees Agamamnon being murdered in the present or near future, but she also sees the dead children of Thyestes. The chorus tell her to shut up, fearing that she is stirring up an Erinys, an avenger. She also sees her own death. Cassandra, of course, is doomed to tell the truth and be disbelieved--this is Apollo’s revenge on her bad-faith bargain: He offered her prophetic power in exchange for her virginity and she renegged. The Chorus don’t quite get the point, but what Cassandra replies is plain as the blood on Clytaemestra's hands: I say you will see the death of Agamemnon (1246). In a few moments we shall.
If we had any sympathy for Clytaemestra, we lost it as she gloats over bodies of victims. The Choros says it all happens through Zeus, but that is hard to imagine. Clytaemestra is now a demon, taking revenge on the house of Atreus. A political struggle breaks out, mirroring the moral and political chaos in Argos, until Aegisthus comes in with armed followers for coup d’etat. He is portrayed as the classic tyrant: proud, bullying, yet insercure. The Choros reproaches him with his unmanliness--a role reversal that also suggests anarchy.
Clytaemestra tells him, at the end, to quit his boasting. It is important to note that it is she who gives the orders. She also has the last word: “You and I ruling together over this house will put things right.”
No one, even a country bumpking who did not know the story, could be persuaded. The central problem is that violence begets violence and blood calls for blood. This is the central theme of the play. Atreus kills Thyestes’ children; Agamemnon kills Iphigenia; Aegisthus and Clytaemestra kill Agamemnon. Where and how will it end?
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"Cassandra is outside time and space–this is in tragedy the lyric prerogative, which gives tragedy its liturgical dimension."
Wow, Tom threw that out there like St. Thomas Aquinas' unassuming statement that "no man falls in love with a woman unless he is first delighted by her beauty." Yet, to understand this is to understand the difference between great poets and good poets, between great cultures who actually possessed a cult and cultivated it, and dieing cultures who first lose their faith in their cult and then their reason for living.
Outside time and space, seeing the things that change and the things that don't for we humans; This is the supernatural over the natural, the city of God over the city of man. And it is the real absence in despairing modernity and the reason for all the groveling of post modernity christians. These contemplative planks reveal real talent in authors and poets more so than any other quality. Most folks these days put permanent things in quotation marks, which is the most obvious revelation that they know not what they are and thus are still enamored by the husk that the swine did eat. Which is why I am always amazed at Dr. Fleming for the way he simply notices the most important things in life or literature and then simply strolls on by musing with delight over his admiration for them, without much more than a word or two. Thank you, Tom, for this post
Do we know if Clytaemestra was always a manly-woman of the cold-blooded cuckoo, "Lady Macbeth" mold? Or could it be that she changed (or a latent character streak in her emerged) as a result of Iphigenia's death?
I'm just wondering if perhaps the killing of her daughter might be interpreted as having inflicted some sort of defeminizing trauma upon the mother.
In general, the Greeks and Romans did not think human personalities changed much, though Aeschylus would seem to be an exception. There is no reason to believe that she was born a freak of nature, but life has been tough. Her husband killed their daughter to keep his business going, and he has been away for 10 years. She tells Orestes explicitly that it is hard for a woman to be without a man--a line that quite naturally disgusts her son. So like Lady MacBeth she is both mannish and oversexed--quite clearly the killing of Cassandra is erotic jealousy, a strange feeling in a woman who hates her husband. But Aeschylus, indirectly, has the power to portray great and deep characters, far more than Euripides who made it his forte.
On tragedy as liturgy, one might consider how different it was from our own drama. First off, it was performed at a religious festival at the Theater of Dionysus. Second, the themes are almost all mythical, but when we say mythical we should really be saying religious. The audience is made of of men who are not enlightened skeptics but pious Athenians who believe in the gods and the stories told about them. Third, the choral lyric passages derive from an old tradition of singing that was closely associated with religious festivals. Aeschylus' great contemporary Pindar wrote secular poems for athletic victors, it is true, be he also wrote Hymns (religious/mythical songs), Paeans (songs to Apollo-Paean), Threnodies (dirges), etc. Imagine a play in which 40% of what goes on were passages sung in the style of say Palestrina or Bach and you get some idea.
Fleming: "No one, even a country bumpking who did not know the story, could be persuaded. The central problem is that violence begets violence and blood calls for blood. This is the central theme of the play. Atreus kills Thyestes’ children; Agamemnon kills Iphigenia; Aegisthus and Clytaemestra kill Agamemnon. Where and how will it end?"
Will the country bumpkin's reaction belie the liberal interpretation of the ending (that the secular state calls forth a higher form of justice)? Will he be reassured in his traditional religious beliefs?
I would not have begun this "discussion"--seems rather one-sided so far--had I intended to endorse the Whig interpretation of the trilogy. I do wish I had correctly spelled bumpkin, though here in America the urban bumpkin is truly king.
So like Lady MacBeth she is both mannish and oversexed – quite clearly the killing of Cassandra is erotic jealousy, a strange feeling in a woman who hates her husband.
Was she supposed to welcome back the murderer of her daughter with a concubine in tow with open arms? Talk about rubbing salt in the wound. How many wives would've tolerated such disrespect? Not only does Agamemnon murder her child, he brings home his mistress to live with his wife. And she is the nut!
Marital fidelity was the duty of a wife, not of a husband. As a Bronze Age king--or powerful man in Aeschylus' time-- Agamemnon would not have been expected to confine his attentions to one woman. A Greek audience, I think, would respond differently from an American
TJF: "here in America the urban bumpkin is truly king."
True, one only needs to browse Mtv to verify this.
Aegisthus appears especially unsympathetic by having a woman help him commit murder. The Chorus sings: "Why with your cowardly heart did you not kill this man yourself, but with you a woman - polluting the land and its gods - killed him?" Had Clytaemestra been no way involved, wouldn't Aegisthus have been justified (blood retribution for the crimes of Atreus) in killing Agamemnon?
"The central problem is that violence begets violence and blood calls for blood. This is the central theme of the play. Atreus kills Thyestes’ children; Agamemnon kills Iphigenia; Aegisthus and Clytaemestra kill Agamemnon. Where and how will it end?"
I might be cheating -- and for that matter I may just be wrong -- but it just occured to me... isn't each successive episode of violence more impious & unnatural than the last, in terms of the relationship of the killer to the victim?
I believe this ties into Dr. Fleming's response to #6.... Aeschylus' people would have regarded the duty of a father to a daughter as less portentuous & significant than the duty of a wife to a husband, I think.
Would a son, who is now the head of the family, killing his mother be more unnatural than a wife killing her husband?
To be fair to Clytemnestra's jealousy, cultural mores aren't always dramatic motives: tragic characters' actions and words regularly express a deeper perception of real goodness -- usually precisely as absent -- than their culture's (Ciceronian) religion strictly permits. Sophocles' plots do this more than Aeschylus', perhaps, but Aeschylus' piety need not exclude the tragic irony that this real/cultural-desideratum slippage creates. (It's generally false that tragic irony is directly proportional to skepticism.) Simply dismissing Clytemnestra's jealous anger as unjustifiable to a 5th-century audience, in light of the audience's standard sociopolitical practices, limits the audience's tragic perceptions to their culture's notion of the good; but tragedy is tragic, and pathetic, exactly in its liturgically-performed presentation of the world as *defecting* from the good.
The controversy over whether the Aeschylean audience would have included women is relevant -- one might plausibly conjecture that the Athenian wife would feel more sympathy for Clytemnestra than the Athenian husband, and the husband more sympathy for Agamemnon than the Athenian wife -- but not conclusive either for or against taking Clytemnestra's jealousy seriously. The Oresteia is *not* about raiding warrior-kings fooling around with prophetesses; but Agamemnon had already violated fundamental familial relations by killing Iphigeneia, and child-murder elsewhere (in Sophocles and Euripides) vividly embodies the violation of the marriage-bond, as the child literally embodies the marriage-bond itself. The Greek concept of phthonos (roughly: envy or jealousy) is doing a lot of work in the background, I think, as much between gods and humans as among humans themselves; and jealousy clearly fuels Clytemnestra's rage, however little this may justify reg/andricide.
I don't know exactly how to fit the murder of Iphigeneia into the rigid calculus of the Pelopian curse, but it must function more exactly than as yet another example of the general 'blood-guilt' theme, or as yet another reason to make Clytemnestra angry. The great unanswered question of the Agamemnon is: How bad was the murder of Iphigeneia, really? The choral passage narrating the murder is extremely moving, but evaluatively very complex, and further complicated by Agamemnon's behavior during the carpet-scene. But the 'weighing of relevant duties' model tells far from the full story, as the rest of the trilogy will show. (This at least is my reading, which I suspect agrees somewhat, if not exactly, with TJF's.)
"tragic characters’ actions and words regularly express a deeper perception of real goodness — usually precisely as absent — than their culture’s (Ciceronian) religion strictly permits."
JE,
This is a very interesting statement and one that I will need to think about for a while. True tragic figures are usually noble and good characters, in fact Aristotle suggests this to be a necessity for the form. Their flaws are often their very strengths gone mad. I do not think that true religion or revelation is inconsistent with this thesis although its temporary or cultural manifestations from time to time may indicate otherwise. The puritan or (Jansenist strain for Catholics) is a heresy and heresy always, like tragic characters, reveals a truth or goodness that is often overlooked or ignored. I suspect from your comments that you may have experienced or been familiar with such departures.
It is always worth pondering in this respect the conversation of Socrates at the very end of the Symposium where he concludes after a night long conversation that tragedy and comedy have the same genus.
Aegisthus is a repulsive character whose rise to power on a woman's skirt is a clear indication that there is something rotten in the state of Argos. In my brief discussion, I indicated he had some of the qualities of the tyrant: a bully who creates a popular faction and then lords it offer his superiors. Those who would see the trilogy as a celebration of Periclean democracy have failed to come to grips with the factionalism at the end of the Agamemnon or with the inability of the jury, at the end of the Eumenides, to reach a verdict.
Yes, to Mr. Salyer, the cycle of violence is worse with every turn, but, as Aeschylus would have known, that is often the way of the vendetta. To understand this, o ne has only to read Njal's Saga.
I believe that the shedding of kindred blood is on one level a worse crime than killing a spouse, but, in killing a husband who is also a king, Clytaemestra is making war on the social order, rather like the criminal who kills a policeman or a judge.
Yes, indeed, JE, you are making a point I should have made last night, but was rushing out to supper. Aeschylus is not writing psychological drama where the primary interests are character and motive. He takes these things into consideration and creates plausible,albeit larger than life characters, but the real action is taking place on a suprahuman level. The audience will certainly understand Clytaemestra's plight and have some sympathy for her initially, but her rage and gloating, by the end, would have been disgusting, while in the Choephoroe, she is almost a stage villain who needs killing. One way of looking at this is to imagine the story as a kind of musical chairs game in which the avenger, once he/she has done the job, must now occupy the villain/victim's chair. This happens most clearly in the case of Agamemnon, who in the next play is treated only as a great man treacherously slain.
The narration of the killing of Iphigeneia is probably the most moving scene in all Aeschylus, as JE points out; therefore, we have a right to see it as pivotal. It is also a scene in which Agamemnon, Zeus's human vindicator, enters into the nexus of causation. At that point, we do not see the connection with the crimes of Pelops and Atreus, but by the end of the play we should. None of this is to suggest either that the king is guiltless--"The gods made me do it"--or cursed or of evil intention. I think, despite the poetry, that Aeschylus has a very hard-edged view of human character. Agamemnon is a bit like a Hardy character who makes one little mistake (selling his wife and child, for example) and must suffer terrible consequences. Unlike Hardy, though, Aeschylus does not overemphasize doom. But, however we might palliate his motives and actions, Greek fathers just don't go around killing their children. I don't believe, for example, that an Athenian audience would have reacted to the story of Abraham and Isaac with anything but horror. Agamemnon kills his child for a good reason. What is Abraham's excuse except that he is obeying some terrible power he calls God?
To go back to Iphigenia, her death scene is pivotal for many reasons. It reminds us that Agamemnon actually loves his child and that his dilemma is unbearable to him, and it also reminds us that the will of Zeus is often inscrutable. Finally, it reminds us that we may think we are doing the right thing for the best motives and yet do evil and in doing evil become evil. On a personal note, I decided to learn Greek at an early age when I saw an abbreviated production of this play on television. I was perhaps 11 or 12. It seemed to me that the murder of Agamemnon was an event fraught with great significance. He had done evil things, it is true,, in killing his daughter and destroying temples, but he was also a great man, Atreides te anax andron--the son of Atreus, lord of men--the only man whose name comes to mind when we ask which mere mortal did Zeus employ in carrying out his most famous act of vengeance against those who had transgressed his laws. The result of his murder is moral, social, and political chaos. It is the end of legitimacy, on the trivial political level.
Did Clytemnestrae kill the vomit who slaughtered her daughter or did she kill her husband? Those are 2 completely different motives for murder. Would she have killed Agamemnon had he not killed her daughter first? I don't think so. She killed Agamemnon - at least in her own mind - when she took a lover but, when she stabbed him, she was avenging Iphigenia.
Women in ancient Greece must have resigned themselves to living in such a vulgar and patriarchal culture. Patriarchy is nothing more than women giving life and fathers taking it away. Yet, Clytemnestrae still maintained her maternal instinct in a culture that totally dehumanized - and to quote Mr Salyer - 'defeminized' its women when it expected them to silently and willingly acquiesce to female infanticide, to the slaughter of their daughters. To expect this brave and strong woman to welcome and sleep with the murderer of her daughter - especially if he was the father of the girl - is nothing short of barbaric and revolting and inhuman.
Orestes kills the parent who is willing to kill for her children to avenge the parent who has no qualms slaughtering his own flesh and bones. But then, that's patriarchy for you.
This sort of approach--to say nothing of the nasty language--to ancient literature is not at all helpful. It is reminiscent of Froma Zeitlin's hysterical writings on Aeschylean misogyny. When someone says "Women in ancient Greece must have resigned themselves to living in such a vulgar and patriarchal culture," he is really saying, "Look, I don't know anything about the Greeks but that does not prevent me from pontificating." Where ignorance is bliss...
First of all, patriarchy means rule by fathers, that is by senior men. In one sense, that is the way the world has been, is now, and ever shall be. Even though men have foolishly tricked women into going into the workforce and have installed a few women in key positions, men still rule the world, everywhere. The problem is that the male ruling class in the US are all too much like Aegisthus, the wolf that sleeps in the lion's bed.
Women in the ancient world have left little record of their feelings, though we do have bits of Sappho and Corinna. However, a comparative study of societies in which men rule with a very firm hand does not turn up a great deal of discontent. All this twaddle about the mean old Greeks and how they suppressed their women comes crumbling down when we consider the great and powerful female characters created by Greek writers: Penelope and Queen Arete and Helen, in Homer. Clytaemestra in Aeschylus, Sophocles Antigone and Deianira, and a whole raft of Euripidean characters. Aristophanes is the character who gives us the best insight into the lives of ordinary Athenians, and women play a major role. Strepsiades in The Clouds seems afraid of his wife and her family; the Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae imagine female insurrections, and, while tongue-in-cheek, are a clear indication of the real power that women had in Athenian life--just as Muslim wives in Arab countries, as they grow older, become family matriarchs while their husbands, in retirement, are more or less ignored.
The only way to learn is to pay attention and not to intrude the very limited perspective of the posthuman 21st century into a discussion of ancient literature.
I don't want to get into this conversation about the play because I have not been keeping up with the reading and conversation but on the subject of Greek drama and its form in comedy or tragedy I did want to suggest just a few points.
The Symposium is at least a meditation on human desire. Drama is a re-presentation of these desires in action. As Joyce demonstrates, a steady stream of consciousness is not living, anymore than a peculiar felicity with words is literature or drama. As a better man of Joyce’s generation wrote: “To live without Faith, without a patrimony to defend , without a struggle for truth and goodness, that is not living but existing”. Which was why Frank O’Conner was correct in saying that “most of Joyce’s writing is a crashing bore.” Afterall, “it is not what goes into the person that defiles him but what comes out of him.” As these desires are replayed on the dramatic stage or told in a story we see ourselves and neighbors in that world --- but it is a world of actions taken or refused, not a world of thought alone as portrayed in contemporary art and sculpture such as “The Thinker”. When life’s crises are overcome during the action by grace, good fortune, wise conduct or just plain luck we have comedy and when the crises prevails and humans fail, we have tragedy. In the Symposium Plato suggests our desires will not rest until they rest in Wisdom, while Jerusalem suggested that our desires would not rest until God’s justice was done. The Christian symbol of Christ and his suffering was a scandal to Greeks and a stumbling block for Jerusalem. It should be neither for the Christian who knows or should know that mercy is twiced blessed and can thus grasp the theological aspects of both dramatic forms. That is all I shall say about the matter and that is perhaps too much for the very interesting commentary on this thread. Thanks
Unfortunately due to computer difficulties I havent been able to participate in this discussion as much as I had desired.A pity,since I'm the pain in the neck who requested it.
If I may briefly sum-up a few thoughts on The Agamemnon that have not been touched upon,and which,it seems to me are central to the whole drama;the connection between war,revolution and female usurpation ( for lack of a better word ).
The departure of Agamemnon for "the windy plains of Troy" set in train all of the mischief back home in Argos.His absence created the opportunity for Aegisthus to execute his coup, and for Clytemnestra's elevation.His subsequent return threatened their newly acquired power,so they bumped him off.
Avenging Iphigenia may have been a motive,but all forms of power,no matter how raw, need some kind of ideological cover or moral fig leaf upon which to repose.And if a particular code has truly been transgressed, then so much the better for those who would make use of it in order to erect their own regime.
Yes,I'm a cynic and I make no attempts to conceal the fact.
As for the capacity of war to overturn an established order the number of examples are legion.Robert Nisbet has written quite eloquently on the topic.Think for a moment of the old Liberal order in Europe after WWI.Think of feudalism after the Crusades.Think of the turmoil surrounding the Gracchi not long after the Punic wars.
Finally, let us consider the ladies.With the dislocations occasioned by war and the consequent loosening of control by the "ancien regime" a vacuum is created which is rapidly filled by those strategically placed to profit from the occasion.Women of the (erstwhile) ruling class are prime candidates for this role.Their lesser sisters feast upon the scraps dropped from the banqueting table.Waning powers maintain an attenuated grip on affairs by and through their women.Think of such figures as Queen Elisabeth I of England or Maria Theresa of Austria.Consider the wealth and power of Spartan women at the time of Agis and Cleomenes.Muse on the elevation of women in the West in the aftermath of their conscription in the armaments industry during WWII.
I dont know if any of this is at all a correct reading of the Agamemnon.They are merely thoughts that occur to me upon its perusal.I'm sure Fleming will clip my ears if they are not.
What you see is what you get. The Greeks parlayed and decided that their future lay neither in cartmaking nor shipbuilding, but instead pandered to hedoistic barabrians with souped-up libidos and a taste for young boys. They allowed sex perverts to build villas in the Cyclades (it's good for the economy), and abandoned their True Faith for mammon worship.
The reason they took such drastic measures is that they felt insecure in their Greekness, and desired to become first Europeans then Global citizens.
I am Greek by birth, language and religion and I find the last statement intriguing. Is Etienne referring to Antiquity or today? I ask this because it is a wholly appropriate expression for modern Hellas.
It's a bit hard even for modern Hellas which is more socially conservative than most of Europe. The government and the cultural elite in Greece are particularly disgusting, especially by contrast with so many decent ordinary people one meets. By the way, there is a good rightwing Christian party, the Orthodox People's Party or Movement, whose members have published pieces in Chronicles.
#14 "It seemed to me that the murder of Agamemnon was an event fraught with great significance...he was...the only man whose name comes to mind when we ask which mere mortal did Zeus employ in carrying out his most famous act of vengeance against those who had transgressed his laws. The result of his murder is moral, social, and political chaos. It is the end of legitimacy, on the trivial political level."
I take it you still believe this is an event of great significance. At the risk of being completely off base, I wonder if there is a connection between the liturgical-timeless atmosphere and the historical-political context in which Aesychlus is writing. Is there a relationship between the mythical-theological realm and the political world of Athens. I'm also trying to resolve what, exactly, is Agamemnon's relationship to Zeus? I'm hoping Dr. Fleming can see what I'm getting at but am failing to express. My only thought seems to be "something really big is happening," but that doesn't sound very intelligent.
Next time, I'll use question marks for sentences that ask a question. I'm becoming convinced that blogging, emailing, and even word processing are killing correct writing. There is something about the screen that detaches the mind from the page. I may join Wendell Berry and start using a manual typewriter. I believe to this day he refuses to buy a computer.
Has this thread been closed?Were the responses insufficient or defficient in some manner?
@20 Hermes
I'm referring to Greece both ancient and modern. I must admit the last time I was in Greece was over 30 years ago, and what I wrote reflects exactly what I sawthen, the Greeks of today are more concerned with blending in with modern Europe (ugh!) than maintaining their unique identity.